Lately due to progress of the electronic technology, portable electronic devices have been developed rapidly with more and more varieties and functions, and thus become widely popular for consumers. The portability of electronic devices primarily attributes to maturation of the battery technique.
For a present-day laptop computer, as shown in FIG. 1 illustrating a conventional charging technique, when an AC (alternating current) adapter is used to input an alternating current to the laptop computer, the laptop computer enters a charging mode instantly without producing any notice message. However, when the AC adapter inputs the alternating current to the laptop computer, if a user does not wish the laptop computer to be charged by the alternating current in order to reduce unnecessary times of charging and prolong the battery lifetime, it is usually to remove the battery from the laptop computer to prevent charging.
However, the above battery removal method causes significant inconveniences to the user. For example, frequent battery removal may easily result in damage to a battery base and contact terminals, and failure of an uninterruptable power mechanism. Furthermore, due to alteration in weight distribution of the laptop computer, lifting a laptop cover is no longer an effortlessness task, and a portion of a laptop support base is provided on a battery cover in a current design of many laptop computers, such that the battery removal would cause infirm support of the laptop base and inconvenient operation for the user.
Accordingly, some manufacturers have tried to overcome the drawbacks caused by the above conventional technology. A solution is to provide a control circuit for detecting an electric quantity of the laptop battery so as to charge the battery when the electric quantity is below a certain preset value; on the other hand, the battery would not be charged if the electric quantity is above the certain preset value. Although such method may effectively reduce a frequency of charging the battery, the preset value is a default value and uneasy to be modified. This makes the charging process not flexible and not able to satisfy the user's timely requirements.
Therefore, the problem to be solved here is to provide a technique for battery charging management, which allows a user to determine whether to charge a battery of a laptop computer according to a practical requirement so as to effectively reduce a frequency of battery insertion/extraction and avoid various inconveniences caused by battery removal.